“Strange people, the Etruscans,” one character muses in Alice Rohrwacher’s new film. “They believed the flight of birds predicted destiny.” It’s unclear exactly what ’s protagonist—played with the requisite brooding intensity, and a half-decent grasp of Italian, by English actor Josh O’Connor—is able to divine when he looks up late in the film and sees a flock of birds fluttering back and forth across the sky. But imagining that the director has somehow interpreted such patterns to help her determine and calibrate the bustle and flow of her fourth feature is not such a stretch. Prone to veering off in unpredictable directions, tumbles and gambols along so heedlessly at times that it ought to be a mess. The fact that everything within the film ultimately proves to
